Socks and Underwear
by Vincent Law
Summary: *03/01/12 - Tweaked chap 3 ending!* The different tensions that abound on The Rabbit are most easily summed up with the frustration Re-L and Vincent have over each other's socks and underwear. What happens, then, when Pino decides that it's Christmas
1. Prologue

**Socks and Underwear**

He had a whole drawer full of them. Full of them! And yet here he was, shambling around in the oldest, rattiest pair he had. By themselves, they wouldn't have drawn her attention since the smell didn't reach all the way up to her. But one of them – the right one – had a hole revealing his big toe as it poked through the worn, net-like material. The scientist in Re-L found it absolutely frustrating: that the mystery of man would defy all logic, order, and hygiene.

It really bothered him but it was something he'd have to deal with twice every day: in the mornings, when she very ungraciously stepped on him on her way to the bathroom and in the evenings, when she sat around waiting for her turn to wash up. It was their routine; stepping on Vincent was her way of waking him up, otherwise he would simply sleep through her alarm. That, and her strange desire for parity, which had made her decide that since she got the first turn in the bathroom in the mornings, he'd have the first turn at night.

From the experiments with the toilet seat, Re-L knew that positive punishment wouldn't get her anywhere with him. For some reason, she was unable to condition him into associating a negative consequence with the stimulus of leaving the toilet seat up. She'd even tried increasing the level of punishment every other time he flouted the rule but to no avail! She started with reminders, then warnings, then scoldings, then threats, and finally, physical punishment, but it all yielded her nothing but that hangdog expression that made her even more irate. The submissive stance – closed eyes, bowed head – Re-L wouldn't admit it to anyone, but she hated that even more than all his _other_ hateful habits put together. She even hated it more than Pino's questions.

It bothered him because although it bothered him, he didn't want it to stop. It bothered him, but he _loved_ it and then felt terrible and guilty for feeling that way. Sometimes, on a particularly bad day that put her into a foul mood (replete with sharp tongue and kicking) the only highlight of Vincent's day would be catching his two glimpses, one in the morning and one in the evening. On days like those, Vincent felt like it justified her kicking him off the Rabbit or letting him run off into the cold in a frenzy to find her while she watched impassively from the pocket of shadow cast by the hull of the ship.

It had to be because he was a proxy. There was no other reason for it. But it grated on Re-L to come to such a conclusion because that was _cheap logic_. _Cheap logic_ was for lower forms of intelligence, such as animals and autorievs and proxies and so on. She knew that cheap logic applied to proxies, because she'd caught him answer a barrage-load of Pino's "how" and "why" questions with "that's just how it is" or "it's magic" or "…uh…I'll tell you when you're older" or "why don't you ask your m– I-I- mean, Re-L."

It didn't help that she wouldn't look him in the eye. For some reason, for the past few days – or was it weeks? It was hard to tell when they lost count, lost track, of time – she rarely made eye contact any more. She was still scowling, as per normal, but now she wouldn't even look him in the eye; her gaze was perpetually downcast. So for the past few days – or, again, was it weeks? – Vincent's spirits had been unusually low and conversely, he looked forward to those snippets of secret, guilty joy in the mornings and evenings more than ever. And then the guilt would catch up with him, and he would continue to be bothered.

She couldn't think when he was so attired, because she'd start staring at them again, and wonder without being amazed at the puzzle before her. Ordinarily, Re-L liked puzzles, but _this_ was a four-dimensional rubix cube. After the disaster with the toilet seat, however, Re-L refused to point it out, stubbornly holding to the hope that _one day she would figure it all out and her world would suddenly make sense._

He couldn't think when she was so attired, because he'd start staring, and all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts would race through his mind. They made things worse and complicated everything. Vincent felt like he was in a dream and a nightmare all at once. It was a _dream come true_ to be stranded on the proverbial desert(ed) island with the woman of his dreams, but a _nightmare_ that she still wouldn't budge on whatever obscure principles she had, even though he really was the proverbial last man in her world. Yet, he had to admit, that _sometimes_ the absurdity and the sweetness of their situation got to him and they produced funny feelings that started somewhere from his depths and rose up to warm him, despite the coldness of their everlasting, windless winter. Sometimes, when the feeling hit, he would be sitting on the edge of the Rabbit, eyes closed and reveling in the experience. Other times, when they were eating their beans with dressing (or rather, now it was dressing with beans) she'd look at him a little funny, and again that sweet absurdity would tug at the lines at the ends of his mouth to form a silly grin on his face. But other times, the feeling would hit him square in the chest when he went to sleep with _that_ image of her in his head and woke up again to the exact same in front of him. Vincent's dreams were getting rather messy and he didn't have the… uh, boldness to tell her. He knew there was no good way to put it across and even if there were, he'd never be able to pull it off and she'd never understand.

She was impatient. In general, she was impatient to be over and done with the whole ordeal, to know what he was, so she'd know what the world was, and know what she was. But more specifically, she was impatient for him to do something about the problem right in front of them. And she refused on principle to give in and demand outright that he change his behavior. That approach clearly hadn't worked at all with the toilet seat for whatever reason there could be. She would not be humiliated in trying again, especially since she was _sure_ he must get some perverse enjoyment in denying her what she wanted. And it made her… sad, to realize that there would always be a barrier between them, always be a puzzle and mystery and an unsolvable riddle, because human and proxy - they were too different, too different to understand each other. It was all in the DNA of their raison d'être. And Re-L was sad because while hers demanded she unlock all the mysteries of the world, the only _one _who made up her entire world just couldn't be changed enough for her to fathom. And what she couldn't understand, she would never accept. Her efforts were as futile as spitting in the wind. Wind that wouldn't come, at any rate.

He was bluely melancholic tinged with the red-edge of desperation. There wasn't every much he could do to relieve the tension between them, the tension within him. Not when they had such minimal interaction while living at such close quarters… with a child companion to boot. B-b-because! he had to make sure that Pino wasn't left out in his attempts to engage their other companion in adult things- eh- uh, like, conversation. …Perhaps the best thing would be to start moving again. Maybe that would take his mind off things, things such as the fact that he'd probably never get what he needed. She wasn't a sadist by any means, but he'd heard that her species denied his species what they wanted as a blanket rule. He could believe it in Re-L's case, and the only comfort he had was that at least, she wasn't playing games. What _he_ needed was probably the last thing from what _she_ wanted, even though he had no idea what it was that she wanted. Oh, to start moving again - but the wind, as always, refused to cooperate. Vincent's attempts looked as fruitful as chasing after the wind.

It was thus, at this point neatly balanced on the peak of their frustration, that Pino decided they would celebrate Christmas.

XXXXXXXXX

**Author's Note:** Hope you enjoyed the first chapter of my fic. (I revised it a little to make it flow better!) I know it's a little long to be an introductory chapter, but I really wanted to explore the tensions going on between Re-L and Vincent during Episode 16 and set up their personal frustration. I'll be getting to resolve the Socks and Underwear bit in the next chapter, so no, it's not done yet.


	2. Pino's Christmas Recipe

**Chapter One: Pino's Christmas Recipe**

Pino's Christmas involved giving each other things.

He had nothing to give, except all of him. He had given everything up every time he had run away, going as far as losing his identity the first time around. And now, with his new face turned against the world, he risked losing himself once more. While staring out into the blank canvas of lazy dreams and the gentle indifference of nature, he knew that he had everything he needed to satisfy him – except himself. He had no knowledge of who he was, except the drabbles from the lips of madmen and prophets who were one and the same to him. But it was easy not to think about oneself in the menial tasks of sustaining one's existence in the blasted landscape. Bathing, sleeping, eating, breathing, being – they proved his humanity, for what needs a god of morning ablutions and breakfast? So he wrapped himself in the garment of _Vincent Law_ and during the dead calm that existed in the still-eye of their hurricane, he deterred the inexorable unwinding of himself.

She had nothing to give except time. Her days were no longer occupied with the routine of exercise or observation–not since their food rations had dwindled to beans and she had used up almost all the pages of her diary. At the start she had carefully documented every scrap of information about the Autoriev and _him, _but she was shocked to find that the days of their sojourn on the snowscape was likely to outlast the pages of her diary. And so, just like their water supply, she had taken to conserving the precious remains of her book. However, her (scientific!) journaling was unlike their water usage. She found that she couldn't simply siphon resources away from Vincent. In fact, it was just the opposite: she found herself itching to document the new discoveries that she made daily, all the while being amazed that as time went by, her findings tended towards exponential increase. The meticulous detailing of Vincent's dominant hand, his sleep patterns and his feeding habits suddenly seemed superficial in comparison to the information she was gleaning now.

Pino's Christmas involved reflection.

He had his moments of epiphany, even in the stasis of his self-discovery. His profoundest moments came when he was lost between joy and sorrow. Sometimes unbidden the words would come to him

_You repeat my fate_

when he looked into a pair of blue eyes that lacked outward adornment. …They were eerily familiar, for some reason. Between himself, he couldn't decide whether he preferred them artfully made up or au natural. Not that he caught sight of them in their natural state that much… seeing that they usually occurred in tandem in the mornings and evenings when he was usually too distracted by her un- um! other adornments.

She fatalistically surmised that her connection to proxies was due to her raison d'être. Or part, thereof. It was a gloomy idea that even though she had run away from the Dome, breaking free of its gaol of artificially-crafted instincts and escaping its all-seeing eye of surveillance, she could still bend to a raison d'être. However, she was nothing but logical, and logic told her a raison d'être could be the only force in the world responsible for driving her to unravel the source of the mystery. And so, she stored up all the information she could in the only space available: her head. She'd watch him, maybe study the angle of his chin as if she were slowly painting that detail with indelible marks to be carefully filed in the vaults of her mind. The collected information would build, she knew, to carve out a three hundred and sixty degree perspective of _Vincent Law _from the blank slate that had –curiously– always existed. She felt her triumph as metaphorical debris unraveled from the blankness to produce, shaving by shaving, a complete image. No more a flat, two-dimensional picture, it was a statue that Pygmalion himself would have wept to discover!…But the triumph would last only as long as she kept her eyes away from his feet. Sooner or later, she'd lower her gaze from the perfection of her mental construction and be stumped once more by the ultimate question – What are the proxies?and

why

do

they refuserefuserefuse to conformto**sense**and**logic**&dona**NEW**pairofsocks**FORCRYINGOUTLOUD**

Pino's Christmas involved wearing special things.

He felt that his customary attire passed the color inspection. In full uniform, he was already red and green. But Re-L? Her blacks and blues wouldn't come close. Was all the color she ever wore merely a repetition of those she had been born with? That was an interesting notion to contemplate. The idea that she was not afraid to wear her personality (literally) on her sleeve for the world to see intrigued him. As for himself, _well_. He recalled seeing Pino try to make her gift by wrapping one of her books with toilet paper. The result had been laughable, but still, the wrappings had not obscured the general size or shape of the book. Thoughts of _the unwinding _made him wonder what monsters were hidden beneath his skin. Somehow he was reminded of what Pino had read to him about an ancient civilization that preserved its dead in a similar fashion to how Pino had swathed her book. That was a time when gods were believed to stalk the earth in the humanity of kings: the sun Himself contained in a mortal vessel. But deep in the forced stillness of the winterlands, his mind would flinch away from the depressing thoughts of having to acknowledge his encroaching godhood. Today, he could be human. So he set his mind four paces back to daydream about Re-L once more and wonder what green or red she could appear in. Green was out of the question, unnatural in a tundra that would never bother itself with the struggle to make leaves. But red? Well, the closest thing she had to red was–

Oh.

He blushed. Unbeknownst to him, his cheeks became tinged with the very color he was thinking of.

Today, he was human. Man, at any rate. _And he would play house with the robot and the automaton for as long as he could. _

Wearing? _Wearing_? She felt him _wearing_ on her, _that's_ the kind of _wearing_ he was doing. Maybe he wasn't really even there-what was reality, anyway?-and was in actuality a Freudian nightmare of symbolism. He could be the Everyman, latent with the potential to become the Beast or the Superman. On one hand, if he could become the Beast, it would represent the repressed carnal instincts of the Id. On the other hand, it could be the Superego at work, transcending common humanity onto a higher plane of existence. And oh! she _knew_ that if that were the case, she would _doubtless_ be the sock! The sock! _Worn, tired, lacking, incomplete!_ and yet, her mind would whisper,

_never replaced_.

XXXXXXXX

**Author's Note:** Wow, I never thought that I'd extend the format of the prologue. But I promise you that there'll be more narrative in the later chapter(s). I tried it out and it just didn't work – I think having the "he thinks" and "she thinks" format highlights a little better how different Vincent's and Re-L's perspectives are. Kudos if you caught on to the irony! Please let me know if it was obvious COUGHthatitREALLYcomesdown2 genderdifferencesCOUGH. Since it IS Ergo Proxy we're talking about, I tried to incorporate some of the random elements that're floating around in the show. You know, having philosophical, artistic (hey-obscure homage to Michelangelo quote!) and literary references randomly chucked at you, visual metaphors, stream of consciousness, a depiction of the gradual change that Re-L goes through during Episode 16… it probably goes a little far afield to try to figure out what the heck the Aus der Wickel (bad German for "Of The Winding," courtesy of Babelfish) project might have been about, BUT BY GOLLY, I SURE DID TRY. (The lyrics to Monoral's _Kiri_, stanza one has a lot of the word "wind" in it.)

Yes, I probably read way too much into a show that was probably cut from the normal 26 episodes to only 23, but I'm a lit major.

So what? :P


	3. Pino's Christmas Colors

**Chapter 2: Pino's Colors (and Clothes Make the Man… Crazy.)**

Out of the many odd customs associated with Pino's Christmas, present-giving happened to be the main one. The good news for Re-L was that Pino also expected it to be done on specific days and held in absolute secrecy. The bad news was that Pino moved on to badger them about colors.

Red and green – as unnatural in the winter-wasted land as they were on Re-L's person.

As for Re-L's moods, Vincent had learned to read it like the weather. The heat before a thunderstorm; the coolness after a sudden shower; the calm during an autumnal afternoon satiated on the mellowness of repose. This moment was quirking irritation, like the sparking of accumulated static. (Doubtless, from cabin fever.) Vincent wasted an idle second wondering if Re-L never wore socks for that reason...

"Re-L Re-L, you must, must! Must!" Pino whined, brandishing crayons in front of her face. "It has to be this color," she said, pulling out her viridian, forest green and mint. "Or this!" she continued, waving sangria, carmine red and russet. "It must either contain 53.413% Cyan with at least 9.04% Yellow or 40.918% Magenta!"

"Stop it," Re-L snapped. "I will not."

"But why!"

Leaning back from the Autoreiv's advance, Re-L pressed a finger to Pino's forehead, keeping her from flailing into her lap. "Pino, if you haven't noticed, I can't exactly change my clothes here. You'll just have to be satisfied with what I have."

"I could color your white coat! With these!" Pino cried, presenting Re-L with the full contents of her coloring set.

"No!" Re-L gasped, shocked. Vincent's hands hid a smile.

"Vince could share clothes with you! You could wear his clothes together!"

Re-L jerked with a start.

"NO!"

She grabbed her white parka off the bed, and hooded herself with the sumptuous fur.

"I'm out of here," she growled. Vincent's hands revealed a smirk, the left corner quirking.

Re-L hadn't counted on robotic persistence insisting on antediluvian cultural practices.

_Her programming must be stuck in an infinite loop. _Re-L thought as Pino dinned the idea of sharing clothes into her ear the next day at lunch time_. Unfortunately, so am I!_

"You know, Re-L," Vincent said as he speared a bean. "We could all do with some new clothes. We could find a commune when the wind picks up and get some supplies. In green. Or red," he said hastily. "If you prefer."

Re-L directed her blue gaze on him. Vincent gulped, wondering if she was going to lash out about frivolity or wishful thinking or that it would be a warm day in this wintry hell before the wind returned. He winced, bracing himself for it.

"I don't look good in green."

"Huh?" Vincent looked up, confused.

"Or red," Re-L said, as she absently tapped a fork to her chin. "Or red and green together, Creator forbid."

"I see…?" Vincent lied.

"Opposite-facing colors on the wheel are said to be very complementary!" Pino protested, upending the whole crayon set to show off the color charts on the inside of the box.

Re-L shrugged tightly.

"Really, you could wear anything. Really. Pino and I are the only ones where, and we don't care— I- I mean, not that we don't _care_, I just meant, it doesn't matter to us—not that it's not important!—you'd look… look… good in anything. "

"Why?" Pino asked, cocking her head to the left.

"Because Re-L is really… wait, why what?"

"Why doesn't Vince care what Re-L wears?"

"I didn't say that..."

"So Vince cares about what Re-L wears?"

"Well, I mean, I do, but not really, it's all right," Vincent beat around the bush in confusion and reddening embarrassment.

"So Vince doesn't not-not care about what Re-L wears?"

"Yes," Vincent said decisively, imagining that if he couldn't decipher that comment, Re-L probably would have stopped listening already in disgust.

"Why?"

"I- What?"

"Why does Vince not-not-not care about what Re-L wears?"

Re-L flipped her hair over her shoulder and turned her chin sharply away.

Vincent later marveled at the complex infrastructure known as the female mind as his next morning broke to a Re-L mixing her eye-shadow with emerald powder.

Laying atop his beddings, Vincent watched from the floor as she crossed her legs over the bunk and meticulously brushed strokes of turquoise just above her lashes. Soft hues appeared, giving a new character to those blue, blue eyes as she painted away.

The man who was Law wondered why this was important to her.

Perhaps this was the power of ritual – established in a society that had been left behind one lifetime and two personalities ago. It was turning out to be less easy to escape these rituals as they meandered and slithered into the gaps of boredom, unmet goals and unresolved tensions, solidifying into the marble of routine. Vincent wondered how many corruptions of whim and habit had infiltrated his daily actions, developing aggressively over mankind's history to insist that they were essential. As necessary as obsessive-compulsion.

Necessary now, at any rate, to keep both of them sane. The eternal questioning, which sounded very much like Pino's nasal _Why, Why, Why_,_ Why_,_ Why_, brought certain conventions (more than others) crashing around his ears.

Coverings. Adornment. Makeup. Clothes. Decoration. Clothes.

These were surely unneeded. Traces from the ruptured past began to form and congeal into memory.

_Fellow citizens! The time is now to consume. Why skimp, when you deserve more? Fellow citizens! Do your part, and make waste. Life is easier when you lighten the load. Fellow citizens! The time is..._

They were so easily summoned from the back of his mind that Vincent despaired at how his Fellow Citizen Conditioning could haunt him, even now. Did it shape his thoughts, perceptions, emotions… raison d'être? So shouldn't he be obligated to free himself from such constraints?

Vincent rolled over in thought.

Without it to impose Romdeau restraint, clarity, order, two poor, bare, forked animals could plunge off the peak of an existential crisis. Give themselves over to glut their appetite and gorge every feeling, until insensate, they hibernated into the death of winter and faded out with the snow.

Re-L raised a finger to blend her makeup.

_Why do you bother, Re-L?_ Vincent would have stopped shaving long ago, except for the fact that he'd caught Re-L staring at him do so on several occasions. Usually, she reserved this sort of attention for his feet. He'd figured that her downward stare was a loaded message; there couldn't be _anything_ interesting about his socked feet, could there? Oddly enough, her study of him while shaving was so intent that he could return her voyeurism without the worry of discovery.

"Could it be that-she… Nah."

Vincent mused to himself, trying to reason it out. With the pedantically clean-shaven faces of Romdeau, perhaps facial hair was fascinating to her. Had she seen beards before? A mustache? Maybe it had the same effect her naked face had on him? (Mosk men never saw women without their makeup.)

Did it occur to her that he was the only one who saw her face as it truly was, and then saw how it transformed into the face she held to the world? Did she see the parallel between their situations?

Did it appeal to her?

_Click._

Re-L flipped her compact case to the side and began with her lipstick.

Vincent suddenly realized that he'd missed seeing her on the way to the bathroom to get dressed. That meant he'd been asleep for two hours more than usual.

Clothing. Makeup. Consuming a total of three hours of a day. And all for… what? For whom?

Were her clothes and makeup nothing more than a thin barrier between the two of them? Illusory but effective, somehow the austerity of a zipped collar, the civility of a pin-straight tie warded off interaction. Intimacy. Instinctive responses.

_Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is as cheap as beast's_… Pino had declaimed that aloud once from the mysterious pile of books that had appeared in the Rabbit. Huddled up on the prow of the ship, the meter of the words had caught in Vincent's mind as a welcome distraction from the strange dream he'd had with an old magician whose riddles had left him just outside the veil of truth. The shock of re-witnessing his first transformation and finding it to also be his first real encounter with Re-L had been amplified at the twin horror and joy at meeting her again in the habitable wasteland Romdeau had lied about to keep them shut up as the bubble children of the world.

Unconsciously, Re-L and Vincent both ran a thumb across their lower lips.

_Oh_.

That first time he'd transformed hadn't been out of horror or fear or pain or rage. What had he been doing earlier? He'd been outside Re-L's apartment, wondering if pacing outside her door and trying to make up his mind whether to talk to her on some made-up immigration matter was stalking or if it would look like dedication worthy of a Fellow Citizen. He'd tried to figure out what she might be doing and imagine her response at his intrusions at the various circumstances. Interrupting her dinner was possibly the safest scenario to hope for, especially if she'd had some wine already… Then he'd heard water running… and everything had kind of gone black.

Only, now, he'd revisited his memories enough to know how to color in that missing space. He shifted uncomfortably. Re-L had every right to want to shoot him. Vincent sometimes wanted to die when he thought about giving Re-L an answer on why he'd been in her bathroom on that night of encounter. And why he'd showed up as Ergo Proxy. Sometimes, he was really glad that the other proxy had shown up when it did, for he wasn't sure what would have happened next with Ergo Proxy in charge, acting on raw feeling and instinct.

_Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st, which scarcely keeps thee warm_, _Re-L. _He now watched her button her cuffs with meticulous deliberation.

Such control.

But he was glad for it, knowing that he himself threw on self-control like a robe. A robe of skin, teeth, hair and blood, fashioned in the form of Vincent Law. And if Re-L could pretend that she needed the makeup and the exacting dress code of the Intelligence Bureau to be Re-L Mayer, then Proxy should be allowed to delude himself in believing that wearing the identity, the manner, the personality, the _humanity_ of Law would really make him Vincent.

It also really mattered because he didn't want a repeat of their first nighttime encounter, when that Vincent-shaped self-control had dissolved under a barrage of baser emotions and intent. She'd looked so shocked, so frightened, so horrified, blue makeup merging into tears that rained onto skin. Marble skin. Alabaster. As soft as snow and just as cold…?

And as he continued his recollection from his view on the floor, he felt the stirrings that heralded unwelcome changes which would creep the hell out of his female companion. In more ways than one.

Up he got. Clutched his last civilizing thoughts that costumed human beings were the only complete representations of people, tried not to visualize Re-L and only Re-L –failed, burst out of the Rabbit in a tangle of blankets and pillow, slammed the door behind him, gripped an ice-crusted rail as elongating nails dug into a rapidly-changing palm. Diluted pink ran down the graying sides of his hands.

_Pink. _

Catching the lifeline, he wrapped his image in it. That could be counted as a Re-L costume, too. Barely. His shoulders deflated.

He shoved his imagination away and willed himself to relax – all of him. The warning grayness of his skin tensed with the inertia of the change, and then deflated suddenly, waning until he was flesh-colored again. Vincent-colored.

_Goodbye, Mr Id. Hyde. Whatever. _

Vincent did a full circle in the snow, patting himself down to make sure his façade had been restored. He took a while as pounding in his head returned with his senses. Then he pushed the door open cautiously, his gaze meeting with curious Pino and a bored Re-L….

And silence?

"Um."

And silence.

"Very good!" Pino cried, breaking the ice. "Re-L Re-L has green and Vince is red!"

"Wow! It's really red! How did you do that, Vince?" Pino aeroplaned to him and tugged at his knee, straining on tiptoes. "Did you put Re-L's stuff on your face again? D'joo see how he did it, Re-L Re-L? Huh? Huh?"

Re-L got up and walked to them, fingers trailing at her hip holster.

"Yes."

Vincent's throat clenched and briefly considered running back out the door; the entrance was only at his back, but she stopped him as she grabbed his chin.

"I was flattered."

The clench lurched down into Vincent's chest.

"Next time, just ask. We're all alone here, anyway."

"Re-L!"

She shrugged, tilting his face left and right at his chin. "You don't have to be embarrassed. _It's not like this is the first time, now, is it_?"

Nightmare and dream come true. She'd noticed. She knew. What was she trying to precipitate? Did she _want_ Proxy? She was looking into his eyes and he shivered feverishly, knowing that she was staring into his soul and reading all its secrets.

"I've connected all the dots already, so you can stop with the morning-time voyeurism and move on. You have my permission."

Just above her thumb, his lip quivered. They were in the bathroom all over again, the steel in her voice and the firmness of her hand and the closeness of her heat and her trailing fingers down his neck planting themselves on his chest—

– promptly shoved him out of her way.

"Uwah!" Vincent tripped and fell backwards onto the deck of the Thousand Rabbits. On his back, he stared upwards at her, completely mystified.

Complacently, she flipped something onto his chest that landed with a light thud.

Vincent sneezed a small cloud of shimmering powder, and realized when the dust settled, that he was staring cross-eyed at her eyeshadow set.

"Knock yourself out. I think you'll want to go with green."

**Author's Note:**

03/01/2012: I revised it slightly. The earlier ending really bugged me. I'm now preparing to write the next chapter and maybe redo this one if I have the time.

****26/06/2011: Thanks for being so patient. I just really had no ideas about what to do until recently – I started on _Mistletoe_ and then it went into a completely different direction. I liked the idea that self-control is a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde switch for Vince. I might redo this completely later if it hate it in the morning, so R&R with your impressions/suggestions for me to make it work better.


End file.
